Acts (‘a diffuse theater of groping and guessing’)
This proposal is for the “installation / piece / performance + talk” format, presenting a 10-minute talk about my interrelated poetry and performance practices, followed by a 10-minute discussion and a 12-minute screening of a new video performance called “Acts (‘a diffuse theater of groping and guessing’)” that is currently in production. This video performance (written, recited, enacted, and produced by me) is a dialogue between two hands in which all the words have been removed and only the stage directions remain, suspending language in the in-between space between action and vocalization. Initially, the hands double the stage directions, but soon they diverge and begin to put on a series of red gloves: archival gloves, lace gloves, satin gloves, rubber gloves, and so on, culminating with comically large foam hands. This work alludes to Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s 1941 performance “Passing Through” and Rebecca Horn’s 1974 “Touching the walls with both hands simultaneously.” The sequence of red gloves and the actions associated with putting them on make for a very slight theatrical arc of rising action and denouement, while still focusing on the poetic words that exist in the more minimalist, linguistic tradition of the poetry reading. Thematically, hands absorb the symbolic value of linguistic communication, agency, labour, and affect, and the work functions as an abstract investigation into contemporary conditions of disenfranchisement, uncertainty, and identity. Named as “theater,” the work functions at a remove from the everyday, and yet it demands necessary answers to how one is supposed to perform oneself and to create a life when labour is undervalued, personhood is depersonalized, and antagonism is a mainstay. The right and left hands also take on a political tenor. The act of putting the gloves on mask the hands, render them less mobile as the gloves become larger and more layered. The hands and the gloves exist in a tense space between individuality and the performance, and an impersonal terrain where “hands are the hands of the body,” or hands are the labourers of the body, not sympathetic agents of a relational network, but mechanical parts of a whole.